Padma Nagappan is a multimedia journalist who writes about the environment, renewable energy, sustainability, agriculture, and biotechnology.It’s one of those ideas that seems too far-fetched to be taken seriously: Deploy a fleet of 1,500 ships across the globe to blast seawater into the sky to make clouds brighter so they reflect more sunlight into space. Why? The deflected radiation would slowglobal warming—in theory.

Called “marine cloud brightening,” the geo-engineering scheme proposed by scientists Stephen Salter and John Latham has been bandied about among academic journals for the past 15 years. But it seemed impossible to put into practice, as it would cost more than $3 billion just to build the ships. Also, shooting salt particles into the clouds would consume far too much energy to be practical.

U.S. economic growth and disruptions on the West Coast are combining to make 2015 a promising year for U.S. East and Gulf Coast ports.

The pendulum of containerized cargo flows has swung from west to east and back during the last two decades. Now it may be swinging back the East and Gulf coasts, aided by a southward shift in Asian manufacturing and given an extra push by renewed questions about reliability of West Coast ports.

Southeast Asia’s nibbling at China’s dominance of Asian manufacturing is boosting Suez Canal services to East Coast ports. That trend may be magnified, at least in the next year, by West Coast port delays that reached crisis levels in late 2014 and are prompting shippers to consider other port gateways.

The Global Port Tracker published by Hackett Associates and the National Retail Federation recently forecast that containerized volume through major gateways for retail imports would rise 4.6 percent on the East Coast and 3.2 percent on the West Coast during the fir…

On Monday, the Eden Prairie, Minn., third-party logistics company (Nasdaq: CHRW) announced that it finalized its purchase of Kansas City-based Freightquote.com Inc. C.H. Robinson said in a release that the cash acquisition was financed using the proceeds from an amended five-year, $900 million credit facility.

The deal closed about a month after the acquisition was announced in early December. Tim Gagnon, director of investor relations for C.H. Robinson, said more information on the transaction, and its effects in Kansas City and Eden Prairie, will be released when the company issues its Securities and Exchange Commission filing on the finalized acquisition, probably by the end of the week.

I may be best known for predicting the global financial crisis and the housing bust of 2008 — but I made another key economic prediction when I warned of major structural risks threatening the Eurozone in 2006.

My remarks proved as prophetic as I'd feared. The crisis I predicted then is still casting shockwaves through the world economy, and may do so for generations to come.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that year, I said that imbalances in the Eurozone would come to a climax — which might lead to a disaster in Europe within 5 years.

Source: bourse.lefigaro.frI made my remarks at a panel discussion on the “Ups and Downs of EMU” I made my remarks at a panel discussion on the “Ups and Downs of EMU” (European Monetary Union). The panel included several key European finance officials — including Jean-Claude Trichet, who was then president of the European Central Bank (ECB).

In a nutshell, I explained that some countries within the Eurozone — especially…